[Mongrel] Mongrel performance study

Zed A. Shaw
2008-04-08T07:20:38Z

On Mon, 07 Apr 2008 23:14:47 -0700
Steve Midgley <public at misuse.org> wrote:

> Hi mongrelians,
>
>
http://www.misuse.org/science/2008/04/07/thin-ruby-on-rails-nginx-fair-proxy-performance-testing/

Yay! You mentioned standard deviations.  Bad! You didn''t give any.
That''d help people figure out if the 4% is even worth it.

> The second test looked at Mongrels vs Thin as the application handler
> for Rails:
>
>
http://www.misuse.org/science/2008/04/07/thin-vs-mongrel-a-ruby-on-rails-performance-shootout/

"Thin is the newest incarnation of Zed Shaw?s (and now community
managed) masterwork Mongrel."

That statement isn''t correct.  Please don''t make it since I
don''t think
the author of Thin or the authors of Mongrel would say that.  Oh, well
they''d say my stuff is a masterwork, just not that Thin is an
incarnation of Mongrel. :-)

> Overall the results were not so surprising but at least there''s a
> little more hard data for people to look at while making decisions
> about this stuff.
>
> Summary 1: Fair proxy can boost performance significantly on sites that
> have a mix of 95% fast (<1s) and 5% slow-ish (4s) pages.
>
> Summary 2: Unix sockets are probably 4% faster than IP sockets (and
> therefore Thin is about 4% faster than Mongrel).

I don''t think it''s unix sockets vs. ip sockets.  These days
those
aren''t really that much faster than a localhost connection thanks to
advancements in performance for internal IPC.

Still, 4% increase for all that work done in Thin is kind of lame.
These kinds of results keep bringing me back to the real problem:
Ruby.  It''s not what IO loop you use, or threading model, or socket
type, but more just that Ruby is slow and it''s processing sucks.

Another comment I''d make is, why not also release the methodology you
gave.  I''m actually working on a presentation for RuPy so if
you''d like
to hack on a repeatable study with an automated report let me know.
Could be a good test for what I''m writing for the conference.

--
Zed A. Shaw
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